¡Viva la Huelga!

Long Live the National Immigrant Workers’ Strike!

Spread the strike to ALL immigrant detention centers!

• Shut down all immigrant detention centers NOW! Release all detainees NOW!
• Shut down GEO Group & CoreCivic—No more public tax dollars to pay for immigrant slave labor camps!
• Build and spread La Unión de Secuestrados por ICE (USI)/Union of People Kidnapped by ICE as the official representative organization of immigrant workers inside ALL detention centers!
• Fulfill all the demands of the strikes!
• Build a united immigrant rights movement with mass, militant joint actions inside and outside detention centers!
• Trump Must Go! Shut down Trump’s fascist police state! Abolish ICE!
• Stop the collaboration of local and state police with ICE!
• Open the borders! Full citizenship rights for ALL!
• Victory to the Palestinian Struggle! – Defeat the U.S. and Israel’s campaign of war and ethnic cleansing against Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon!
• Build the international movement against fascism and war!

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For years, we have joined massive protests for immigrant rights and Palestinian liberation chanting “Brick by brick, wall by wall; Detention centers have to fall!” There is no better time than now to make those words real, if we follow the example of immigrant detainees inside Delaney Hall and mobilize coordinated direct actions inside and outside every infernal structure that continues the torture and deprivation of liberty of all our brothers and sisters.

The hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, which began in the men’s section and has now expanded to the women’s section, is the latest in a series of ongoing immigrant detainees’ nationwide hunger and labor strikes. Delaney Hall—which is a recently reopened privately run GEO Group immigration detention center, housing over 1,000 immigrant detainees—has become the latest horror show in America to garner national and international media coverage.

On May 22, 300 immigrants inside Delaney Hall said no more to having their dignity violated and their labor exploited and joined the call begun a month earlier by La Unión de Secuestrados por ICE (USI)/Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. The migrant union was formed through another labor strike inside a GEO Group/CoreCivic run detention center in Torrance, New Mexico. The strike continues in the facility until today, even though the majority of the initial members of the strike were transferred to other facilities, including Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, where the strike has also spread along with the expansion of the migrant union. Immigrant detainees have also followed their lead in Adelanto Detention Center in Southern California, another notorious death prison run by GEO Group.

The strike at Delaney Hall has continued non-stop for 20 days. Although some women were part of the strike from the beginning, today on June 12, the strike has expanded to Unit 1 with over 40 women known to have joined the fight. Migrants began a hunger and labor strike, refusing to carry out the slave labor necessary to run these concentration camps and against the hellish conditions. Through the course of the strike, despite severe retaliations, detainees have won some important victories. The strike has won the release of pregnant and teen women detainees! And through the course of the strike, there have also been releases of men in need of medical attention and the physically disabled. These were two prominent strike demands.

Hundreds of supporters have mobilized outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. They have militantly stood their ground against the brutal repression, first by ICE and prison guards, and then by state and local police forces sent by New Jersey Democratic Party governor Mikie Sherril. But this is not a new fight, nor a new issue. Immigrants, their families, and progressive groups have been raising the alarm and in some cases have succeeded in shutting down these horrible places, and we can succeed again. Every time that protests outside have been brutally repressed by police, it has only served to inspire more people to join subsequent demonstrations.

The initial strike action garnered media coverage after family members of the detainees and community members mobilized in support outside of the detention center and sounded the alarm about the retaliation against strikers inside the facility. Immigrant detainees were denied their right to communicate with family and attorneys, some were forced into solitary confinement, and some were physically beaten by ICE thugs and denied medical attention. All participants had a series of classic intimidation threats of deportation, arrests of additional family members, forceful transfer to another state, and much more. The media coverage has been deliberately downplaying or altogether ignoring the overarching union demand to end the forced-slave-labor prison system imposed in all these for-profit detention centers.

Legal challenges to private prisons’ violations of state wage labor laws have succeeded in Washington and Colorado, despite ongoing appeals by GEO Group and CoreCivic with the help of the federal government. Both of these states are run by Democratic governors, as are California, Michigan, and New Jersey, other states where these notorious concentration camps are located and there currently are ongoing strikes. The failure of Democratic Party leaders to enforce their own state labor laws is a damning exposure of the complicity of the Democratic Party and their scandalous photo-ops outside these detention centers. This failure is an important reason why the strikes are happening.

What makes these hunger and labor strikes different from the countless strikes carried out before, is the forming of La Unión de Secuestrados por ICE (USI)/Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. USI began with 140 migrant workers striking in Torrance, New Mexico detention centers in April of this year, from where it spread to Tacoma, Washington to the Northwest Detention Center. An organized union of migrants inside detention centers with demands that go beyond living conditions but also address the questions of labor exploitation and profiting from migrants suffering by GEO Group, CoreCivic, and ICE—this struggle by USI has sparked a militant movement inside and outside detention centers and is rapidly spreading. These strikes will continue until the practices of slave-labor and gross repression of basic human rights inside these for-profit modern concentration camps are exposed and stopped once and for all.

Currently there are over a thousand immigrants imprisoned in various detention centers who are taking part in ongoing hunger and/or labor strikes. New Mexico, Texas, California, Washington, New Jersey, and Michigan have ongoing migrant strikes, and word is spreading to other detention centers. These actions point the way for our national movement, and we must spread them!

Three things are being made clear: (1) The Democratic Party is not going to save us; we must take independent direct action ourselves, through coordinated joint actions inside and outside detention centers; (2) it is high time to shut down modern-day slavery inside immigrant detention centers, which are funded with public tax dollars; and (3) we must understand this struggle as part of an international struggle to remove Donald Trump from office and to defeat fascism in defense of basic human and democratic rights.

With over 90% of immigration detention centers run by private corporations, it has become a normal practice to exploit migrants by forcing them to carry out every job inside the detention centers for a pittance or no pay at all. What would normally cost these parasitic corporate groups the hiring and full staffing of hundreds of workers following state wages and benefits and health and safety laws to run and clean the kitchens, laundries, floors, and bathrooms, carry out building repairs, and perform upkeep of the facilities—is all forced onto immigrant detainees. These Nazi-like concentration camps are a stark reminder of the increasing threat that Donald Trump and his fascist government represent for the future of humanity.

The $45 billion funding of ICE, beyond the increasing hiring frenzy of ideological and sadistic thugs, is enabling the expansion of massive privately-run concentration camps profiting from slave labor. ICE and their corporate partners are scrambling to open up worn-down massive warehouses nationwide—undoubtedly unfit to jail hundreds, if not thousands of migrants. This gross expansion of concentration-camp warehouses is already meeting overwhelming opposition from local communities. Facing active militant protests in the streets, city councils, ICE and corporation offices, local governments are being forced to oppose—usually only too meekly—the opening of these warehouse concentration camps through lawsuits stating concerns about health and safety standards. But this is not a legal dispute to be settled by clever legal arguments inside a courtroom, hoping the case won’t reach a pro-Trump majority fascist US Supreme Court. This is a political fight, which in reality will be settled by the level of independent struggle in the streets and our ability to bring that struggle inside the courtroom. We must speak the plain truth about these concentration camps and express the voice and power of organized migrants inside detention centers and the increasing militant mass action of the people building protests outside the detention centers.

The current victories at Delaney Hall and other sites of detainees’ strikes are in part because of the threat they represent to Donald Trump’s police state. The mass militant Los Angeles anti-ICE raids’ protests last summer, and the anti-Trump explosions in Minneapolis, Oakland, Portland, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and other cities, are our model of success. Each of these cities had independent community mass mobilizations that succeeded in garnering nationwide support, defeating Trump’s fascist ICE thugs, preventing them from carrying out raids, and driving them out of our cities. To win these strikes, Delaney Hall, Adelanto, North Lake, Northwest, and other Detention Centers where strikes are happening must each have national mobilizations that can garner the power of our national movement. We must speak the plain truth of these concentration camps and express the voice and power of organized migrants inside detention centers.

Long live the national immigrant rights fight!
Victory to the No Kings anti-fascist movement!
Victory to the immigrant rights struggle!
Victory to the movement to defeat and overthrow Trump’s fascist government and his fascist Supreme Court majority’s attacks on human rights!

June 14, 2026

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